Traduction française de l’article écrit par Ruud Hein, le 30 mai 2008.

Cette semaine, j’ai regardé le film “INDIANA JONES ET LE ROYAUME DU CRANE DE CRISTAL” et ne pouvais m’empêcher de réaliser comme j’ai fait du chemin. Non, pas nécessairement du point de vue de ma carrière… Bien… En années, simplement.

Jetant un regard sur mon magnifique avatar vous pourriez aisément être déçu et même être tenté de me dire : “Mais non Ruud, tu as l’air aussi jeune qu’un cheval fringuant!- et de toute façon, on a l’âge de son cœur, oui, de son cœur mon ami!”

Image courtesy: scribblesandwords.com

Time is not on the side of Cuil.com, the newest behemoth search engine which is boasts searching 121,617,892,992 web pages (at time of writing this).  Upon giving it a try, as anyone should, I find that it seems to be fraught with error and a graphic free-for-all for returning relevant results.  Will I write it off as a non-contender?  Probably not so quickly.  It has definitely grabbed my attention and I will probably do comparative searches on both Google and Cuil to see what differences, and what similarities appear.

Ours is a geek industry where Ethics is a valid topic for conversation, forum threads, newspaper articles and blog posts.

As an example, here’s a small selection of SEO blog posts from June that in one way or another deal with Ethics:

• Blackhat Ethics: Whose Rules Are They Anyway?
• Hey Google NoFollow this!
• SEO, Colored Hats & The Pollyanna Pissing Match
• In Defense of Hats: White, Gray, Black and Blue
• The Evil Side of Google? Exploring Google’s User Data Collection
• What Are Community Standards?

Recently, as I’ve hit 40 and somehow my body has just realized this , I’ve been out of the running a little bit as my body seems to be falling slightly apart. As a mental case good SEO everything relates to SEO for me. And thus while giving my body the rest it needed I was thinking “this is why you need some kind of perpetuum mobile of SEO”. I might have mumbled it instead of thinking it as I distinctly remember a person of the medical profession going “come again?” but face it, that’s besides the point.

This week I watched "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" and couldn’t help but realize how far I’ve come. No, not necessarily career-wise but …well… in pure years.

Glancing at my handsome avatar you might easily be deceived and even attempt to argue; "But no way, Ruud, you look like a young grasshopper — and anyway, age is all in the mind, the mind man!"

OK… Well then let me tell you this.

You know you’re old(er) when you know "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" is a sequel, the fourth (count ‘m: four) movie.

Last week I wrote about how the SEO industry is growing up. Tremendous growth and low barriers to entry are / will attract many new entrants to the market.

But with formal SEO training not yet available on mass (i.e. taught in colleges), this growth is going to leave us with a talent shortage.

Essentially, large companies who want to get into this business are going to be forced to buy their way in.

In order to prepare your shop to possibly benefit from this increased M&A activity, it is helpful to have a sense of what factors will make you attractive to a perspective purchaser.

Image - CasualChatters.com

Retail therapy helps us to feel so much better when things don’t go our way, and it would seem that the same is true for large corporations with lots and lots and lots of big bucks!

Image Courtesy - lemetrosexuel.com

Since Microsoft’s offer to purchase Yahoo! didn’t seem to turn out, they have found themselves with all this money for acquisition available and a designer outfit that appears to be unavailable at this time. Like any savvy fashionista, they’ve decided it was time to head to the mall for some serious retail therapy to make themselves feel better about not getting what they’ve been holding all that lovely money for. LO AND BEHOLD! Like spying the first Abercrombie & Fitch store L.A. (and a demographic to match), Microsoft has decided to head on over to� facebook and see what fits.

Image Courtesy - ab initio ad infinitum

So it would seem that everyone is in a race to become as transparent as possible.� It has become (clearly) evident that there is more revenue potential out there by opening up everything and making it available than there is by keeping it all horded and secret and hidden in the dark.

Cell phone technology is a brilliant example of transparency becoming extremely key.� It’s helping mobile carriers and equipment providers to quickly and easily design, develop, and deploy in tandem.� It’s also giving software development platforms such as Google and Microsoft the opportunity to build out their handset web technologies.

At the brink of an economic recession which will forever change the way we live, how secure is your job?

OK, you know this one:

It’s a familiar graph.

But for most of us that extreme upward trend has never applied to these:

Corn

Soy

Wheat

The price of food is rising at an incredible rate.

The managing director of the Asian Development Bank puts it like this;

"We just have to accept the era of cheap food is over."

So I don’t know if you recall in the past when I mentioned that I believed Live to be the branding where Microsoft planned on competing with Google.  (See Virtual Reality - Microsoft Office Live).  Well, we should look at some of the things that they are doing from the User perspective.

Nice and clean, free of advertising, and links to other Microsoft places of possible usefulness. It’s very familiar, don’t you think?  Ever seen anything like it before from any other extremely successful search engines?